She could outdraw Santa when it came to pulling in a crowd and she taught us all to love Popeye and The Three Stooges. For anyone growing up around here during the past 50 years her name was synonymous with childhood.
Sally Starr died Jan. 27, two days after celebrating her 90th birthday. She is as much a part of our childhoods as Mom, apple pie and a sunny day at the beach. Starr was married two times yet had no children of her own; however she unofficially helped mold the thousands of us who would rush home from school to sit in front of our black and white television sets at 4 p.m. to see the glamorous cowgirl with her long, platinum blond ponytail and six shooters on her hip regale us as she stood poised next to a log counter.
She could sell us anything, as witnessed by a generation of kids who learned to drink Cocoa Marsh by watching her commercials done live. With an elegantly manicured hand she’d push down on the pump of the jar and chocolaty bliss would slide down the side of the glass she held in her left hand. She’d stir it up on camera and drink a mouthful down. She told us to go bowling and we flocked to the lanes. Not because we wanted to bowl, but we wanted to please Sally Starr. It was salesmanship at its finest.
Because of her, men and women throughout the Delaware Valley have a sharpened awareness of the hilarity of Moe, Larry and Curly as well as Olive Oyl, Alice the Goon, Wimpy and Bluto. Our mothers would fret as we nyucked to the sight of a good pie fight or as we flailed our arms with each blow Popeye gave his nemesis. Occasionally Sally would remind us that it wasn’t real and we shouldn’t try it at home.
Her relationship with the Stooges was so strong that she was offered a part in their last movie, “The Outlaws is Coming.” I can still see the hundreds of kids who filled the Kent Theater during its first matinee showing. We laughed at the Stooges but the place went up in a thunderous roar when Sally, playing the part of, what else, Belle Starr appeared on the screen.
Throughout her long life she always held a soft spot for kids. And we, in turn, held her in our hearts even after we grew up and found out our star spangled cowgirl suffered the same ills that seemed to befall most of us. Poor health, a divorce, an early widowhood and a house that burned to the ground all took their tolls on Our Gal Sal. But, cowgirl that she was, she lived through example. She taught us when life’s ills throw you off you pick yourself up and get right back on your palomino because love, luck and lollipops were waiting for you just around the corner.
I had the pleasure of meeting Sally 25 years ago after she had returned to the area after her Florida home had burned to the ground, and with it most of her memorabilia and an autobiography she was working on. I was seven months pregnant at the time. I remember walking into a meeting of volunteers who were arranging a benefit to help offset some of costs of returning north. When I saw her my heart stopped beating. It was as though I was in the presence of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny all rolled into one. I was speechless. She reached out her hand and shook mine. “Hi! I’m Sally,” she said. I very sheepishly replied, “I know.”
Long before Oprah, Sally was the grand dame of afternoons in Philadelphia until 1971 when the new owners of Channel 6 decided they didn’t want to offer children’s television programming anymore. She was fired. According to the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia, who inducted Starr into their Hall of Fame in 1995, by firing of Our Gal Sal the station received more letters of protest than it had in its history. In true Sally fashion she picked herself up by her glamorous bootstraps and moved over to UHF. She didn’t get the same crowds but she was still entertaining kids.
Eventually her tenure as a children’s television host came to an end and she went back to her roots on the radio. She also spent time working on a production line in a factory and working in an airport driving a cart. That was our Sal – she believed in the honor of all work.
Sally stayed in New Jersey. She found a “home” at a radio station in Vineland and was able to broadcast until 2006 when she decided to retire to her home in Atco where she remained until she took ill and was admitted to a nursing home.
For all of us of “a certain age,” the loss of Sally Starr is profound. Little by little our pasts are chipped away like Popeye punching his way through a block of stone to get to the Olive Oyl-absconding Bluto.
For me, the loss of Sally Starr is deep. Growing up in the late 50s I wanted to be a cowgirl. I wanted a horse for Christmas and I wanted six-shooters. I didn’t want to be Roy Rogers’ Dale Evans or Sky King’s Penny. I had no desire to play second fiddle to a cowboy. Sally Starr taught me, and thousands of little girls just like me, that it was a-okay to be a cowgirl with your own horse, boots, pistols and television show. She was a pioneer in every sense of the word. And she did it with élan and with a graciousness that doesn’t come this way too often.
Rest well, Sally Starr. Know that a generation of kids holds you in that special place in their hearts called childhood. In a world where heroes are hard to come by, you were one of the best.